Oracle Blog

Jan Lahoda's Blog

Monday Jun 26, 2006

Lets continue with our survey through newly planned features for a future version of NetBeans.
Today, I would like to focus on one of the most important features of a modern IDE - code completion.

The code completion is undergoing a total rewrite. The new code completion should provide not only
in much better performance than the old one, but also a handfull of new and cool features:

keywords suggestions: the code completion will propose keywords usable in a given context:

smart completion: a special type of the code completion which proposes only
suggestions that match to the current situation by type. For example, if you type List l = new ,
the smart completion will only propose subclasses of List, like ArrayList:

smart completion for catch clauses: for catch clauses, only exceptions thrown inside
the corresponding try block are proposed by the smart code completion:

Monday Jun 19, 2006

As you can probably imagine, the NetBeans development did not stop with
NetBeans 5.0 and NetBeans 5.5. A new version of NetBeans, which is already
being planned, is supposed to bring many new features. I would like to describe
some of them here. Please note that all I will present here is preliminary and
subject of change.

One of the most visible new features is extended coloring in the editor. The code should be colored
not only according to the lexical information (aka syntax highlighting), but also according to syntax
and semantic information. For example, fields should get a different colors than local variables, etc.:

Additionally, also content for Javadoc comments and string literals should be colored to
allow better orientation:

And last, but not least, the unused elements will be detected and shown in gray:

Many more new features and improvements are planned: improved code completion, improved code templates,
editor hints improvements, and many others. Stay tuned for details.